It’s not totally unheard of for a long haul flight to return to its origin, but typically it’s either due to a maintenance issue or medical emergency. Well, here’s a reason you don’t often hear for a diversion…
Continue reading: Virgin Atlantic Flight Diverts Because Pilot Hadn’t Completed Training
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
There are so many checks and balances made for signing off on training so it appears this slipped through the cracks - a “Swiss cheese” situation
The FO is the one ultimately on the hook for this. How he was unaware that he was not on a line training flight is unfathomable. There is a mini-forest of paperwork that needs to be done for those. And of course the crew rostering system should not have allowed this to be scheduled in the first place.
Continuing on the flight once the issue was detected would have been a horrendously bad idea. Insurance in particular would have been an issue should anything have gone wrong.
The most dangerous part of a flight is takeoff and landing. And they FO was fully qualified per the regs. So, seems to me the safest thing to do when the plane was already at cruise altitude was to continue and land in New York.
Instead, every passenger was subject to an additional takeoff and landing, as well being 3+ hours late to New York.
If that's the actual map of the flight, they were off the EAST coast of Ireland, not west coast.
@Lucky….big typo in the 5th paragraph. You meant that the first officer had **not** completed his line training…
To my understanding, the pilot in question was fully licensed to fly the aircraft. It was the company's own training policy that hadn't yet been fulfilled. I feel as though the headlines I'm seeing for this story in various places are misleading.
I had to re-read a couple of times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding what was going on. Small word but not-so-small implications on the article.
We are often quick to criticize (usually with good reason) airlines for their failures, but I think Virgin Atlantic should be commended here for fessing up to their mistake, adhering to their company policy, and taking the financial hit (given that no legal regulations were being violated) and return to base. Hopefully they proactively offered passengers fair compensation.
This is click bait. He was a fully trained pilot. He just wasn’t signed off by Virgin Atlantic's standards.
I was fully trained to deliver babies but before I could deliver them on my own, I had to be signed off on a certain number of deliveries. It’s not that I hadn’t completed training when I was one delivery away from being “signed off”.
As someone who works in corporate training in a highly regulated industry (not aviation), I'd say the training division and executive leadership bear almost equal blame as the FO. It is up to trainers to ensure that folks are notified of training and delinquencies and to ensure that their superiors/scheduling is notified of this.
Similarly, executive leadership should have a simple structure in place that just doesn't allow crew scheduling to schedule someone who hasn't fulfilled the requirements.
A possibility is that the FO was assigned this pairing with the assumption that he would have completed his final training pairing prior to this, but one of those flights may have been canceled… with scheduling not realizing the issue because he had been assigned it in anticipation.
Oh absolutely. The crewing system, if properly programmed, will not permit assignment of pairings with restrictions like this so it would flag this pairing immediately. That the flight was able to proceed means that someone either overrode the system flags manually, or someone failed to input the correct data.
Someone somewhere screwed up to begin with. The final failsafe was the FO and he only figured it out once they were already airborne.
I'm wondering if this was some kind of publicity stunt to demonstrate how seriously they take internal pilot protocols - "Yes, the passengers were inconvenienced, but safety first!"
When BA famously flew an LHR-LAX flight with an engine inoperable soon after take-off, it is nice to see Virgin taking the safe approach.
This exactly makes the point of safety first.
They are ready to give compensation to each passenger for a delay just because of 'company policy' on safety.
Airlines in the States are required to have their flight training program approved by the FAA. Not following the training program is the same as violating an FAR. The UK may operate the same way.